Knock Wood, He`s Still Alive

BIRMINGHAM, MICH. — Today`s assignment, class, is to write your own obituary. Think about it. How would you kill yourself? How would you sum up your life in two short paragraphs?

Here is an actual example from the world of golf, not the first place one looks for authors--or corpses, for that matter.

Mike Reid, who thrilled crowds with back-to-back victories in the Utah Open and the Jeremy Ranch Shootout, died yesterday when he stuck a shovel into his garden and struck a high-voltage wire. He is survived by his wife and two daughters.

``You must remember,`` said Reid, ``I was writing for a Utah audience.``

Not that it matters. Reid could have said almost the same for national review, except maybe make his demise more romantic.

He might have, if he insists on dying by electrocution, been struck by lightning at the top of his backswing as he was about to hit the shot that would win the U.S. Open--a victim of puckish demons who have failed to convince him for nine years that he has no business making a very nice living playing a game that requires him to sometimes hit fairway drivers to reach the green, as he did twice in the first round of the 85th Open.

Reid could not, however, improve on the facts of his golfing career. His biggest victory would still be the 1983 Utah Open, a non-tour event, followed immediately by the Jeremy Ranch, another Utah outing that teams young pros with old ones. He shared that title with Bob Goalby, who lists it somewhere below the Masters in his own catalog of accomplishments.

``My trophy case,`` said Reid, ``is not crowded.``

Now 31, Reid is attempting to finish his degree from Brigham Young University, hence the auto-obituary assignment for a mass media writing class. He is still majoring in communication at BYU, whence he first emerged nine years ago looking as much like a Norman Rockwell notion as he does today, skinny as a skeleton and armed with a golf game too anemic to harm the legend of Palmer--Arnie or Sandra.

Still, Reid once before led the U.S. Open after the first round, as he did for most of Thursday before Taiwan`s Tze-Chung Chen double-eagled his way into Open history and first place and Fred Couples muscled ahead of him into second.

Reid was an amateur in 1976 at Atlanta and so green to tournament golf that he didn`t even know he was leading the world at the end of the first day. ``I didn`t know how to read a scoreboard,`` he said. ``I was finishing about 8 o`clock at night, and I could see the numbers and the colors and I thought it was nice that someone was keeping track. But I thought my score was just for the afternoon round and that somebody in the morning had shot 63 or something.``

That round, a 67, was followed by an 81, a classic example of turning a silk purse into a sow`s bladder.

``I had two triple bogeys, on nine and 18,`` said Reid. ``I hit a 7-iron into the swimming pool behind the ninth green and put myself right out of the tournament. I didn`t know until a month later that my 7-iron was really a 5 1/ 2-iron. What did I know about club loft? I just thought I was hitting my seven a little strong.``

One imagines Reid`s delight in hitting any club strongly. He is to golf what the whisper is to opera. He can`t hit a ball far enough to lose it, which has to make him the friend of any of us who can look at his game and see ours. No way can we imagine hitting a ball like Couples, for example, whose first shot of the day traveled more than 350 yards. Or Andy Bean, tied with Reid, who was pleasantly surprised to find his tee shots flying over bunkers placed 270 yards ahead.

Reid may not win this Open, but for one day he played the game the rest of us know, one of only seven players to break par, reaching into his bag for woods while his competition plucked out irons with numbers high enough to need two hands to count.

On the fourth hole, 433 yards long, Reid hit a driver from the fairway for his second shot. Couples hit a 9-iron.

Reid deserves our attention today for cheerfully living day to day with the words golfers most dread to hear: ``You`re away.``

``As much as I would like to hit the ball farther,`` Reid said, ``you got to dance with what brung you.

``I`ve seen guys come on tour with games like mine and try to change and lose what they had trying to gain 14 or 15 more yards off the tee.

``The only discouragement I`ve ever gotten from golf isn`t from not hitting it far enough, but not hitting it well enough.

``Size doesn`t really mean anything in golf. I go out and I`m anxious to see what I can create, to see what happens. I`m interested and aware. I love the challenge.

``It`s too early to to think about winning the Open, but I did pretty well the first lap. I`m going to enjoy this first round, not like in Atlanta when I was too numb and too dumb to really know what I had done.``

And, being a student writer of news events, how might Reid file this story?

``Nine years might seem like a long time, but for Mike Reid, it seemed like yesterday.``

Not bad. If Reid ever decides that golf should be left to bullies, maybe he can fall back on journalism--though, as James Thurber once observed, that`s a little like falling back on an open kit of carpenter`s tools.